YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
The episode starts out establishing the baseline for Constantine's character. He is in an asylum being subjected to voluntary electroshock therapy to forget something that he fears that he will always remember despite his efforts. We jump from there to three months later where he is meeting with one of the doctors. We see that Constantine is not at all secretive about his chosen profession as an exorcist and master of occult magic, that he insists that "Newcastle" happened the way that he said, and all he wants the doctor to do is convince him otherwise, to make him believe that he's crazy and made it up so that he can move on. Then a demon leaves him a taunting message, "LIV DIE", and he checks himself out the same day. One of his friends, who has since died, has a daughter named Liv, who Constantine has sworn to protect, and so he rushes to her side. Of course she doesn't believe him that a demon is after her, so he gives her his business card.
A business card which actually says exorcist and master of the occult on it, how awesome is that!
Later that night, Liv returns home to her crappy apartment, and a tall, imposing man follows her to her door where he carves a symbol of protection, an Eye of Horus (I had an Ancient Egyptian geekout when I saw this) on her door and creates a barrier of salt at the threshold, so that later when the demon comes to kill her, it cannot enter, so it kills her friend from across the hall instead and possess her body, and tries to kill Liv the next day at work by running a medical examiners van through the front of her workplace. This time she sees her possessed friend, and so she starts to believe Constantine and his friend Chas (the man from the night before), who are also there, hoping to take her away to a safe place.
Very concisely, we get the necessary exposition regarding the history of Liv's father out of the way. His name was Jasper, and he was a man who, with the help of a special pendant, could see the spirit dimension alongside ours, and tried to teach Constantine to do the same. Liv has the same gift. Constantine gives her her father's amulet, and we get a very visually impressive and compelling sequence which establishes some of the supernatural aspects of the show, at least visually speaking, and gives us an idea of what to expect. We also learn that Jasper died at Newcastle.
From there we are shown another aspect of the show. Chas is killed tanking a power line through the chest that was meant for Liv, but later, when Constantine and Liv show up at Jasper's safe house, Chas shows up, too, seemingly unharmed, and it is implied that he is some ancient, hard to destroy thing, and not entirely human, but we aren't told any of this outright. Instead we are allowed to witness it for ourselves. If fact the first bit of lore-building that we are straight up told is that Liv has the power to allow a drop of her blood to flow down the amulet onto a map and divine where some supernatural evil will happen, but even this is accompanied by a visual.
We get a few scenes here of Constantine and the others just being at the safe house, with tons of cool occult stuff, like a mirror which shows reflections of different times alongside ours, and a fantastic Easter egg which reminded me that this is a DC show: the mask of Doctor Fate (spinoff bait?), and then Constantine announces that he has a plan, but it will require that he use Liv as bait. He has learned the name of the demon. It is Furcifer, a demon who uses electricity to attack, and who Constantine is convinced he can send back to its home in the Inner Circle of Hell, from which is will have a difficult time returning.
Even though Liv trusts Constantine now, the audience at this point shouldn't. See, I mentioned earlier, in the very first paragraph of the review, that John Constantine is a defeated man, and I meant that. He was beaten by a demon, tricked, because of his arrogance, into condemning the soul of a nine-year-old girl to hell, and he was likewise condemned by Heaven for doing this. We learn this throughout the episode in bits and pieces, through dialogue between John and the angel Manny, who has some purpose for John, and through dialogue with an old friend of John's who now wants nothing to do with him: a techie names Rich (or Rick, or something like that, I can't remember) who Constantine goes to for help with his plan. The tragedy involving the girl was "Newcastle", and the angel is holding it over John, offering him his soul back should he continue to fight demons in Heaven's name. This sounds good, but it opens a door. What happened to this girls is a point of weakness for Constantine, and if Hell really has her, they can use that against him.
So the following night, Constantine sets his trap for the demon, and while we are waiting, we get our second and last instance of fully spoken exposition in this episode, when John relents and tells Liv the story of how he came to be involved in the occult. His mother died in childbirth, and his father blamed him for it, so Constantine wants to bring her back and atone for what he did, even if it really isn't his fault. Then the demon shows up, and he seems to have Constantine outmatched, being that they are in the middle of a city, and therefor there is electricity all around them, but that's when John sets off his trap. Rich (Rick) has been lying in wait, and when the time is right he hacks the city power grid and causes a brief blackout, cutting the demon off from its life blood and weakening it, so the demon tries to bargain by bringing the soul of the girl up from Hell. It promises that if Constantine releases it, the girl will be freed as well, and John is instantly willing to sacrifice Liv to free the girl, until Liv uses her powers to see that it is another demon in disguise.
His resolve restored (as much as it can be), John renews his efforts and declares that he will get the girl back in his own time, before sending the demons back downstairs. Liv heads home and learns on the way that her scrying was correct, that someone died at the place that she divined, and in the only annoying scene in the episode, we suddenly jump to Constantine at a bar. Chas comes in and says that Liv left for California, where she has family waiting, but that before she left she scryed dozens of locations where evil will occur, and John meets one more time with Manny and agrees to keep fighting. He leaves and he get the trailer shot seen above, with his hand alight with flames as he repels random attackers. Queue credits, and WOW.
This show was great. Its imagery was top-notch, with great creepy visuals, amazing sets, great acting, and a genuinely satisfyingly triumphant ending, and the promise of exciting adventures to come down the line. Constantine was immediately likeable, between how much you feel for him in regards to his past and his mistakes, and the fact that he is genuinely funny, with his disarming sarcasm. We didn't get too much of the other players in this episode, which is something that I would have liked to see in this introductory story, but focusing on Constantine so much allowed the show to establish him as a proper badass. I was a little disappointed by how abruptly Liv left at the end, with hardly a goodbye to the character at all, but the episode's propensity for using show don't tell to establish its rules and build its world around the characters more than made up for this deficiency. While I feel that the genre will prevent Constantine from being the general public's cup of tea, I recommend that anyone even remotely interested give it a try. I give it a 9 out of 10, truly a gem of the fall season.
Will I be reviewing these episodes each week like I do Doctor Who? I don't know, but I guess we'll see how I feel after the episode next week, and either way you should check back in later for another review.
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